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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Henry Adams

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Henry Adams
Age: 80 †
Born: 1838
Born: February 16
Died: 1918
Died: March 27
Historian
Historian Of The Modern Age
Journalist
Mathematician
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Frances Snow Compton
Henry Adams
Culture
Ignorant
Facts
Diversity
Form
Intelligence
Nothing
Ignorance
Accumulates
Teaching
Inert
Amount
Schooled
Education
Astonishing
Teach
Educational

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You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.
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By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.
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The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
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Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.
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As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
Henry Adams
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For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!
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I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
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Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
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It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.
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Unity is vision it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
Henry Adams
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One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
Henry Adams
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Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
Henry Adams
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Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.
Henry Adams
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
Henry Adams
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The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
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The philosopher says--I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers:--No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.
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Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough its judgments rougher still.
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Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
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